Chapter 3. Speech acts
People use language to do many different things. For example, language is used to claim something, to insult someone, to promise something to someone, to ask something, to give a command, to express surprise or to do very specific actions, like when a judge declares someone guilty or when a civil servant declares two people married. Acts that are performed linguistically are called speech acts.
LIS has developed specific grammatical constructions that are typically associated to certain speech acts: declaratives are typically used to make assertions, interrogatives are typically used to ask questions, imperatives are typically used to elicit a behaviour from the addressee and exclamatives typically convey the information that something is surprising or noteworthy. However, there is no one-to-one correspondence between sentence type and speech act, as shown below.
